In recent decades, various theories have challenged what appears to be a hegemonic dominance of liberalism in at least three directions: economic, legal and the political dimension of the community. Among these, two stand out for the extent of their criticism. One of them is republicanism: From the sixties onwards it went through a significant revival due to the work of figures like Quentin Skinner, JGA Pocock, and Philipp Pettit. Republican criticism of liberalism seemed to come into being based on the very strength of liberalism, a theory of liberty. From here it went on to recover an understanding of the citizen, the law, and power which questions basic principles of liberal theory as the “right”, “the State” and the possibility of ‘vero vivere libero e civile’ in a kind of depoliticized society.

Meanwhile, in parallel to the above, from agonal democratic theory (Tully, Mouffe, Honig, etc.) a critique of liberalism regarding in how far it immunized society from politics was developed. The understanding of the state-liberal as an intrinsic denial of the possibility of conflict inherent in the political struggle. Thus, the “consensus” produced under the abstraction of the rule of law replaces the essential agonal character of democracy. If so, this raises the question as to how far expressions like “liberal democracy” and ” representative-democracy” are not oxymorons constitutionally speaking.

In this volume, from a historical perspective and one of the philosophies of law and political theory, the following topics will be addressed:

Special Edition

“Capitalism in the Global South: Extractivism, Landnahme and Accumulation by Dispossession”

During the past decades, political economy has made a significant contribution to the understanding of the relationship between politics, economy and society (Weingast y Wittman, 2006). Nevertheless, capitalism, its classical study subject, did not receive equivalent treatment regarding its consolidation inside political science, international studies and sociology (Streeck, 2008). This relative state of abandonment of the subject has taken place in an intellectual and political context that favored the stigmatization of critical approaches to capitalist development. Especially of approaches that focused on globalization, marketization and their consequences, as central phenomena for the study of contemporary societies.

In this context, different analyses of capitalist development through its space-time expansion to non-capitalist environments constitute responses to the weaknesses of political economy approaches. The critique of capitalism in a global or cross-regional context would not only remedy the methodological nationalism but also conceives correctly capitalism’s dynamic of appropriation or colonization of the non-capitalist “other” (Harvey, 2005). Here originates the need to formulate an epistemological approach that is able to account for the complexity, inequalities and global labour division of capitalism.

Pléyade invites to explore the potential renewed critical studies of capitalism, which remain faithful to the studying of the dynamics of exploitation, capital accumulation and capitalist expansion in the Global South. Hence, this special issue will focus on the interdependent inequalities of Asia, Africa and South America. These regions, former colonies of European Empires, are considered as underdeveloped or as parts of the periphery of the modern world system. Pléyade invites authors willing to contribute with articles about a variety of problems posed by capitalist development in the Southern hemisphere, with an emphasis on the concepts of (neo)extractivism, accumulation by dispossession and appropriation through colonization (Landnahme).

List of possible Topics:

Differences and similitudes between extractive and neo-extractive processes.

Environmental, economic and cultural impacts of extractivism.

Spatial restructuring, appropriation of new territories and (neo)colonisation of space.

Marketization of nature and appropriation of metabolic processes.

Commodification and exploitation of natural resources.

Violent appropriation and dispossession experiences.

Marketization of social life.

Capital capacities and its limits to penetrate subjects and communities’ social and daily life.

Overexploitation and precarization of work and life.

Neoliberalism and its relation with extractive regimes.

Coloniality and new modalities of capital accumulation.

Formation of political resistance and social movements.

Development alternatives: post-development; de-growth; Good Living (Buen Vivir).

New Issue of Journal Pléyade: Work and Intellectual History of Ernesto Laclau

New issue of our publication number 16, published in December 2015 corresponding with the semester July-December. The issue entitled “The work and Intellectual history of Ernesto Laclau” was coordinated by Hernán Cuevas Valenzuela (University of Chile) and Ricardo Camargo (University of Chile). This volume includes articles and a new section (“interventions”) which tributes to the work of Ernesto Laclau.

Each of the articles and interventions can be read in our academia.edu profile. Also the digital version can be downloaded and read using the following link. In a few weeks the issue will be available for download on the index websites:

Pléyade is an international peer reviewed journal dedicated to the Humanities and Social Sciences, published by the Centre for Political Analysis and Research, Santiago, Chile. It is published biannually (June-December) in print and electronic versions. Since its founding in 2008, the journal encourages intellectual and academic discussion of political phenomena, from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives including philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, political science, international relations, economics, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, among others. Pléyade receives contributions such as articles, interviews and reviews, written in Spanish or English.

This dossier of Revista Pléyade is dedicated to the work and intellectual history of Argentinean political theorist Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014). After completing his doctorate in the United Kingdom (1977), Laclau worked for many years as Professor of Political Theory and later as Professor Emeritus at the University of Essex, where he created a groundbreaking doctoral program on the analysis of ideologies and discourse. He also worked in renowned North American universities such as Northwestern University. Nonetheless, Laclau never lost touch with the latest developments in Latin America. Proof of this is that even in the later years of his career, he founded the Debates y Combates journal, conceived as a forum for theoretical discussion that, from a political point of view, sought to play an active part in and shed light on the changes that have taken place in Latin America in the last decade with the election of national-popular governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina.

Taking an intellectual history approach, Laclau’s work can be divided into three relatively clear phases. The first was marked by his attempt to create a Marxist theory of ideology and politics based on the works of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. In this period, Laclau made important contributions to the internal debate in Western Marxism, such as his collection of essays Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and the groundbreaking article Marxist Theories of the State: Debates and Perspectives (1981). In the second stage, Laclau explored a theory of post-Marxist hegemony incorporating post-structuralist philosophy. The publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, written jointly with his life-partner Chantal Mouffe (1985), earned him international recognition as a political theorist. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe criticized the economic determinism and essentialism of Marxist thought. Taking a more proactive approach, they offered an original reflection about the new sociopolitical identities and a reading of politics as a hegemonic practice free of the determinisms of class. The third phase, in turn, can be characterized as a maturing of the consequences of the latter stage, as Laclau sought a greater development of the post-Marxist focus by means of a deeper engagement with Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivist philosophy and an interpretation of Jacques Lacan from Freudian psychoanalysis.

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy would be followed by New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1991), Emancipation and Difference (1996), and a controversial volume co-written with Butler and Žižek titled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2003), On Populist Reason (2005), and finally a collection of posthumous essays The Rhetorical Constitution of Society (2014). Together, these publications reveal a deepening of Laclau’s thought and the development of an original political and social theory.

Laclau’s post-Marxist theory brought together apparently dissimilar theoretical bodies that he interpreted as parallel efforts to resolve the main aporiae of modern social thought. His analyses were inspired by concepts and ideas taken from Husserl, Heidegger, Schmitt, Derrida, Wittgenstein, and an extensive corpus of Western philosophy and political theory. With further contributions from Anglo-American and continental analytical philosophies, Laclau creatively combined structural and post-Saussurean linguistics, rhetoric, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Western Marxism, especially in its Gramscian current. This apparent eclecticism, however, did not detract from his theory of discourse, which over a number of decades remained true to its ontological and epistemological anti-essentialist and post-foundational premises.

The concepts of discourse, articulation, hegemony, dislocation and antagonism, radical democracy and populism are the pillars upon which Laclau built his social and political theory. In addition to the aforementioned, other important theories such as the nodal point, the empty signifier, the logics of equivalence and difference, sedimentation and reactivation, myth and the imaginary, ideology and identity as identification, lay the grounds for a theoretical edifice that is at once complex and rich and that has inspired and stimulated countless studies on political, social and cultural phenomena.

Also worthy of mention is the recent political influence that Laclau’s intellectual work has had on the national-popular governments that have come to power in Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and the social movements that burst onto the political scene in places as different as Spain with its indignados movement; Greece, with the recent rise of Syriza and Chile, with its large-scale mobilizations for public education.

In summary, Laclau left a vital theoretically and politically influential legacy is worth revisiting a year from his passing. Therefore, this dossier invites authors to make contributions in the different areas where Laclau’s work found expression (whether theoretically and politically). Along these lines, the proposed themes could include:

Contemporary debates on politics and the political

New perspectives on radical democracy

Marxism and post-Marxism revisited

Populism in Laclau’s political theory

Laclau’s contribution to Latin American national-popular governments

Laclau’s political theory and its influence on the new European political processes: the case of Podemos and Syricia

Laclau’s political theory and its influence on the movement for public education in Chile